Pieces of my Heart by Jamie Canosa

Author:Jamie Canosa [Canosa, Jamie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-11-02T16:00:00+00:00

Seventeen

*Jade*

Lights slid across my ceiling from passing traffic. Outside, a car alarm had been blaring for going on ten minutes. People were starting to get upset. Profanities were being hurled from open windows. I ignored it all.

The sun was coming up and I still hadn’t shut my eyes. I’d lain awake for hours, searching the darkness for answers I knew weren’t there. Sometimes there just weren’t any answers to be found. There was good in the world. I knew that. I'd experienced it, however briefly. But where there was good there had to be bad. To balance everything. Maybe I was just one of those people meant to shoulder the bad, so that others could experience the good. Things weren't quite so depressing if I looked at them that way.

The sound of a smashing window didn’t even faze me, and the car alarm dissolved into silence. Not the kind of silence I’d found in the pool with Caulder. This was a static silence, the kind that made my skin crawl and my brain buzz. It wasn’t peaceful. This place didn’t know the meaning of that word.

Clouds blotted out the sun, blanketing the room in shadow. Rain was beginning to fall, which would soon be forecast as snow. Wind rattled the window panes and made the curtain dance where it leaked in around the ill-fitted glass. One drop, then another, splatted against my window. Then a hundred more, running together, warping what lay beyond into little more than a swirl of dark colors and vague shapes. I blinked and realized that the inside of my room was equally as blurry.

I kept telling myself that I should get up, move around, do something. But why? Why bother? What reason did I have for getting out of that bed? When I thought about it, I couldn’t come up with a single good one.

I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t want to listen. I didn’t want to think. My heart felt like a punching bag. Every time I opened it up, it got pummeled. I just wanted to lie there—alone in my room—and let the moisture outside mingle with that in my eyes until it washed the whole world away.

But, as usual, life didn’t give a damn what I wanted.

***

“What happened to you?” Simon slipped around the counter to hold the door open for me as I struggled to get inside without dropping my crutches.

“I fell down some stairs.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

I made it through the death trap and breathed a sigh of relief.

“I’m on shift.” It was the first thing to drag my sorry butt out of bed in days.

“You’re on crutches.”

Crap. I knew this was going to be a problem. I’d just hoped . . . What? That they wouldn’t notice? “Simon, please . . .”

I had to work. Not working wasn’t an option. Not if any of us planned to eat this week. And the gas bill was coming due. No gas meant no heat.

“Jade, I’m not trying to be a pain in your ass here.

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